Hilary Green. Educational Reconstruction

Linked directly to social status, identity, and citizenship, access to educational resources has been a pressing issue for generations of African Americans since the antebellum era. Following emancipation, during the short-lived epoch of Reconstruction and the long-drawn-out era of Jim Crow segregation, African Americans’ enduring odyssey for knowledge and educational capital through a variety of institutions—such as primary and secondary schools, colleges and universities, literary societies, and libraries—became even more important. In distinct yet complementary ways, the two books under investigation here pertain to how African Americans, with little or no federal and local funding, struggled to acquire knowledge and education, to establish viable independent institutions, and to resist white supremacy in the Jim Crow South. Hilary Green’s Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865–1890, probes how two urban African American communities in collaboration with well-meaning, progressive white allies conceptualized, founded, and maintained an identifiable and vibrant “system of education” (an urban-centered movement that differed from Booker T. Washington’s more rural-concentrated crusade) during Reconstruction and the early years of “the nadir” of black life (162). Organized chronologically, Green’s study is shaped largely by how these various campaigns for high-quality education gradually transformed over time. Cheryl Knott’s award-winning Not Free, Not for All: Public Libraries in the Age of Jim Crow explores another black-education creation story: the founding and preservation of “public library collections and services” for (and sometimes established by) blacks in the South during the first six decades of the twentieth century. Unlike Green’s thorough microstudy, Knott’s wide-reaching narrative consists of numerous examples from throughout the nation for more than half a century. For African Americans during the era of Jim Crow, Knott argues, libraries served as significant conduits of education and identity formation, “universities of the people,” and “secular social spaces” (3, 167)

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